esd, sound (was Re: Suggestions for Breezy... )

[Martin Pitt]

Hi!

Justin Mason [2005-06-02 10:15 -0700]:
> Alexandre FRANKE writes:
> > > Additionally, I think it would be a good idea to use dmix for sound
> > > rather than using a sound server, as dmix doesn't require applications
> > > to be written for it specifically as does esd.  I've noticed many people
> > > have been asking about setting up Hoary to allow non-esd sound, so this
> > > seems like something that should be considered for Breezy.
> > 
> > Gnome 2.12 (which I think will be used in Breezy, as Gnome's schedule
> > is almost the same as Ubuntu's) no longer uses esd but gstreamer.  See
> > http://www.gnome.org for further information about that.
> 
> eek -- in my opinion dropping esd/polypaudio would be bad!
> 
> if I recall correctly, according to ALSA people, automated setup of dmix
> will not always work, due to differences in sound hardware requiring
> different "magic numbers" in the asound.conf file for period_size,
> buffer_size, rate, periods etc.  In my experience, incorrect values here
> on my Thinkpad T40 *almost* work but produce stuttering and crackling as
> soon as the CPU becomes busy or X activity takes place.

Currently, Breezy does not use any sound daemon at all, but is
configured to direct gstreamer -> ALSA dmix output. I did not hear any
complaints for now, but OTOH not many people use Breezy so far.

The reason why we did this was that esound does not work with dmix, it
just sounds terrible. polypaudio works fine, and a few days ago I was
notified that some of the worse bugs of polypaudio had been fixed, so
we can consider putting polypaudio in again.

I think this will be a more robust solution for Breezy at least.

> As a matter of interest, how do GNOME intend to support multiple apps
> accessing non-hardware-mixing sound hardware with gstreamer? I was under
> the impression that framework did not deal with that issue.

That works fine with dmix.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt              http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian Developer        http://www.debian.org
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